


Mary, Mary Quite Contrary

by greenbirds



Series: Friends'verse shorts [4]
Category: NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, Stargate SG-1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-07
Updated: 2011-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-16 04:20:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbirds/pseuds/greenbirds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four things that grow in Hetty's garden, and one that doesn't anymore.  Companion piece to "Both Feel in Their Own Small Way."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mary, Mary Quite Contrary

# I. # 

Hetty plants crocuses outside her bedroom window before she does anything else.

The lawn is still a scraggly mess (for now she'll water it and mow it and all the necessary things, but when there's time, she'll have it taken out to make way for the flagstoned garden paths she can already see in her mind's eye, for a fountain and a profusion of roses and irises and daffodils in rolling waves) and the flowerbeds are choked with weeds and half-chewed daisies. There are plenty of other urgent garden chores to occupy her attention, but first she plants crocuses.

The corms don't look like much (little brown misshapen things) but there is promise hidden deep within. She tamps the earth gently over them with her little spade and sits back on her heels. The little flowerbed looks like a patch of bare dirt for now, but in a few months it won't.

(Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, round the corner.)

Maxim offered to plant them for her when he saw the little packet, said he knew the perfect spot. She'd hired the little Russian man (with his gray-shot black hair and his short unkempt beard) to tear out the hideous old rubber tree growing just outside her front door, and when he'd proven to know far more about gardening in Los Angeles than she'd managed to glean from the _Sunset_ guides and a couple of calls to the local Cooperative Extension, she'd kept him on.

(“But Hetty dear,” her neighbor Lilian protested, “the man _drinks_.” Hetty ignored her.)

Maxim meant well. Hetty told him it was all right; she'd plant the crocuses herself, knew right where she wanted them, and set him to pruning the poor overgrown citrus in the back corner of the yard (those would stay regardless of whether they produced fruit; she loved the smell of orange blossoms in the spring, and not every beautiful thing needed also be useful).

She cleans her spade carefully on her gardening apron and smiles, enjoying the warmth of the sun on her back, the pleasant exertion of this small task.

She remembers walking in the garden with her papa when she was a girl, remembers how he always used to smile with delight when he saw the first crocuses, all yellow and purple and hopeful. Her papa only believed in God sometimes, but he told her with a smile that crocuses were God's promise that even the longest winter would eventually end.

(That first spring back in Boston after East Berlin and all that came after, she'd seen crocuses unfurling determinedly in the snow, and wept..)

A promise of springtime is hardly a necessity in Los Angeles (perhaps she'll walk on the beach this Christmas, and enjoy the sun) but that's not the point. Some February morning (or perhaps January, in this warm strange land), she'll open her curtains of a morning and be greeted by yellow petals and unfolding leaves.

(Go, go, go said the bird. Human kind cannot bear very much reality).

# II. # 

Maxim makes her tea in the Russian way and brings it to her with a little caviar and hard crisp rusks, and he complains about the ivy climbing up the old wooden back fence. He doesn't know, he says darkly in Russian, what she was thinking when she planted it. Ivy is impossible to get rid of. It will pull down the fence before long. (Then again, Maxim sighs, it's not as if Hetty Lange has ever had much sense.)

This is an old complaint, practically a refrain. (Dawn points, and another day prepares for heat and silence.)

When Maxim was away visiting family (Hetty thinks he went to visit a daughter he never got to raise, but Maxim doesn't talk much about himself; she knows his life story only through tiny clues and guesswork), Hetty tucked the little plant with its tender variegated leaves and its little grasping green fingers into a well-prepared hole up against the fence and smiled.

It didn't take much time for the ivy to make itself at home.

Once upon a time, she could have told Maxim (but she didn't), there was a little scrap of ivy growing in a little blue pot on the windowsill of a drab, cramped two-room apartment in Volgograd, straining (like the rest of them) towards what few scraps of sunlight it could find and hoard.

Growing things, Hetty told her ducklings (told Jack and Jenny and Jethro), fed the soul.

Jethro (never much of a romantic) merely shook his head and sighed. Jack touched the ivy with gentle fingers and told her sadly that the tiny plant would probably die.

Jenny watered the ivy faithfully, and it tried very hard to thrive.

(Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers.)

# III. # 

Jenny sends Hetty the first rose cuttings after Jenny sees the fountain.

Jenny, like everyone else, is dutifully awestruck by Hetty's fountain. Carerra marble, movie studio salvage (in this town, it pays to know people), with a basin about twice the size of one of those inflatable wading pools. The central plinth is carved in the shape of a heraldic dolphin, and the water it sends skyward shines and dances for a moment in the sunlight before it plunges to earth again. They said Hetty would never get the fountain home intact, and everyone who sees it wonders aloud how she did.

A magician never reveals her secrets.

Jenny claps her hands with delight and grins (Jenny grins far too seldom these days). “I know just what you need to plant here, _tyotia_ ,” she declares.

It's not long after that the cuttings start arriving. The first few are painstakingly-packed and perfectly legal specimens from a nursery supply company: Midas Touch and Mr. Lincoln, Blue Girl and Gray Dawn.

The others (visitors to this alien shore, and Hetty decides it wouldn't do to inquire too closely how Jenny managed to get them through customs) come later. White roses from the South of France, the rich deep red blooms Hetty had admired at the botanical gardens in Vienna. A plant from Russia that would later grow huge flowers edged in an even deeper pink (the Russian blossoms are tough; when cut, they inevitably outlast all the others).

Maxim helps Hetty plant Jenny's roses, and later, he trims them back every winter. Curses fluently in Russian and English when he stabs himself with a thorn (but stubborn man that he is, he won't wear the expensive rose gloves Hetty buys for him; Maxim says the point of roses is that they can hurt you. Hetty rolls her eyes).

Ever year, throughout the summer and fall, the garden around the fountain is awash in a rainbow of roses and sparkling water.

(And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, and the lotos rose.)

# IV. # 

There are red and yellow tulips in the flowerbed just outside the French doors . Those doors had been the second improvement she'd made to the house, right after she had a new water heater installed; most days in the spring, the french doors are flung wide to admit sunlight, fresh air, and birdsong (also the sound of passing cars, but it's a relatively quiet neighborhood – for Los Angeles – and Hetty does her level best to ignore them).

She'd never intended to plant tulips there, never really intended to plant tulips at all (not that she had anything against the flowers, other than finding them a little bit trite, a little bit common. But like a certain handsome, quiet young man named G. Callen, the littlest of her ducklings, they'd just never been part of her plans).

(But to what purpose disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves I do not know.)

He came to them – to Hetty and Jethro and Jenny – in Russia in those latter days, when the Air Force had already whistled for Jack and he had gone, and just before Jethro and Jenny would fly away home and Hetty would pack up what few things remained to her and move on to other shores, following the hand of her masters. Callen – then – had been sharp, quick-minded, barely more than a boy. He'd reminded her, sometimes, of a young Jack, before Moscow and Leningrad and last of all Poland had stolen Jack's innocence (before Hetty had stolen it away). For awhile, they'd been a funny little family, they four.

Callen learned to call her _tyotia_ , Auntie, and he learned her rhythms, her quirks, learned to sense the dark tides of January (the deep waters of Moscow and East Berlin) without knowing how to name them. He saw her clearly (perhaps too clearly) with those bright blue eyes, and Hetty loved him (he was the first of them she had dared to love in a very long while).

It had been a happy surprise when they were reunited in Los Angeles (not all shocks, she had to remind herself, were bad ones).

“These aren't for your birthday,” Callen said when he presented her with the little pot of tulips a week after the date she did her level best each year to forget. “I just saw them yesterday and thought of you.”

Hetty never planned to plant tulips in her garden, but every spring she smiles to see them bloom.

# V. # 

When Maxim comes to tend the citrus (she hasn't bothered to let him know she's back from D.C.; the effort of picking up the phone and talking to another human being seemed immeasurable when she walked through the door) Hetty's standing by the garden gate in a dark blue suit and four hundred dollar Italian leather shoes, ripping out stargazer lilies with her bare hands. The task is hard; their roots run deep, and she'll have to dig out the bulbs later to make sure they don't come back.

(She'd loved them once, her stargazer lilies, with their pinks and their yellows and their eager little stamens, loved the joyous riot of color, loved the way the bees buzzed around them. That had been before a Steuben glass vase full of lilies, before the 'condolences' of a snake in man's clothing named Kevin Balim, before Jenny's funeral).

Hetty knows she'll never be able to look at another stargazer lily again. Not without remembering.

(That which is living can only die.)

It's the middle of summer and she's not wearing sun block; her gardening hat is inside, tossed across the bureau where Hetty left it a lifetime ago, the morning she left for D.C. (Jenny had still been alive then, and there were bees buzzing around her lilies, and all had been right with the world).

Hetty knows she'll have a sunburn to show for this afternoon's toil (Hetty knows Maxim must think her a lunatic, standing here in her new suit and new shoes pulling her favorite flowers out by the roots as if they're weeds, but she hasn't the energy to explain it).

Maxim looks at her quietly, but there is neither horror nor pity in his dark-eyed gaze. He merely nods, picks up the pruning shears and a bucket, and makes his way to the overgrown lime tree.

Later (after Hetty has gone inside to change her clothes and scrub the green stains from her hands), he picks up the shredded lily plants and puts them into big black garbage sacks, carefully digs out the bulbs and puts them in the trash as well. He puts the black plastic bags out on the curb (garbage day's tomorrow, and he never forgets), lets himself into the kitchen, washes his hands. Makes tea (makes it in the Russian way, strong and black). Hetty can hear him rattling around in the kitchen.

He doesn't say anything when he sets the teapot and the sugar bowl and two cups on the desk in Hetty's study.

Hetty is startled when she finds herself weeping stormy tears against her gardener's shoulder. He smells of soil and tobacco smoke and sweat. He holds her carefully. When the tears stop, he hands her a handkerchief.

Maxim pours two cups of tea and says he's thinking of planting irises where the lilies used to be, or maybe paperwhites, depending on which she'd prefer.


End file.
